Get Free Traffic. Use Bum Marketing and Squidoo

I started to use Squidoo in order to get traffic to our online store - Fun Cool Collectibles. From August to November I had put up five or six lenses with this in mind. In November I got a payment for 15.00 from Squidoo - and I thought, "Holy Smokes, I can actually make money, while I promote my my store". So, I have been promoting my store, and making money from Squidoo. This is great. I have joined affiliate programs, and we have more than doubled traffic to our Fun Cool Collectibles Store

The key to making money on Squidoo is bum marketing! I discuss this in great deal in my lens Bum Marketing Your Way to Success on the Internet and The Search Engine Directory about getting your website and lenses ready for the Internet. If you can not wait to start Squidooing start by clicking here. Believe me it is addictive!

Bum marketing has been described as a form of marketing that is so inexpensive that it can be masted by a bum. It is the most inexpensive form of marketing, that technically anybody can use it to do their marketing. It is labor-intensive but you will be able to utilize it to drive traffic to your website.
It is centered around articles and so called landing pages. A Squidoo lens is the prime example of a landing page. You have an objective - sell products, sell affiliate merchandise, or to even sell a way of life.
When you have chosen your objective, you will proceed to set up a squidoo lens to sell your objective, with your unique selling proposition (USP). When you have finished setting up your Squidoo Lens, now comes the hard work.
Writing articles.
You will be writing several articles and submitting them to article directories. This is important, because people will visit your website and your Squidoo lens. How many articles should your write, as many as you can.
These will also provide you with links to your website and to your Squidoo lens, and help you with your Page Ranking.

I have set up an account over at Myspace and just left it neglected for awhile. I then saw that you could make some money on setting up accounts and then selling them. I now have over 2800 friends, and I am getting more traffic to some of my lenses, then from search engines . Holy smokes, the traffic to some of my lenses have increased as I wrote little blurbs about each of them on my Myspace Blog. There are many ways to promote yourself at Myspace - bullentins, messages, comments, blog, profile, and more. So, go over to Myspace and add me as your friend!
Well some of my lens will not attract significant amounts of traffic and some will attract lots of traffic. You just have to try different headings for your bulletins, and post comments on high traffic profiles.

I like to Squidoo because I have so many interests. Squidoo allows me to write about the stuff I like, and some of the stuff I am not even sure about. Because Squidoo gets so much traffic, people will actually read my stuff! That is great. Currently, I have 23 lenses, and ideas for over 200 more. I am trying to write about 2 lenses a week, but that is getting hard. I like to research my stuff before I put it up. If you check out many of my lenses, the beginning starts out with a bit of history about what I am writing about. Some may not have any history, but they will eventually. I have been called superficial, because I know a little about a lot. I am not a specialist about anything.
I always wanted to be a writer, my mother still has 10 boxes of my writings in her attic. I wanted to throw them away, but she insisted that they stay where there are, she always thought that maybe I would get back into writing. The stuff I wrote about, I do not even think about it anymore, it is the work of an angry young man who wanted to find a way to change the world. I still insist, to her, that the stuff can be burned, but she wants to keep it. She can have it.
So, Squidoo allows me to write about more topical ideas. I love sports, many of lens are about sports, and I will be dealing with exercising and weight loss in the future. I love Cats, big and small. Many of the big cats are endangered, and I would love to do my part by writing about these majestic animals.
I am also a decent cook, so you will see some lenses about cooking, especially about sauces, I believe that this is the basis for excellent meals. If you have a great sauce, you will have a great dinner. I would spend whole weekends, just brewing up sauces for the week to make my dinners.
Most of all, I like to Squidoo, because I got paid to Squidoo. While most people might not think that 17 bucks is not much, I made this with only a few lenses, and most of those lenses were primarily put up to promote our Fun Cool Collectibles. Most of the lenses through 2008 will be to promote some worth while causes as well as our Fun Cool Collectibles Store. I hope to have 130 lenses by next Christmas.

What are tags? These are keywords that will help people find you in search engines, and at squidoo. You should visit the Tag Clouds part of Squidoo, and see what people are looking up when they come to squidoo. You are allowed to use up to 40 tags - by all means use them all. Many of my sites have 40 tags, and I am still going in and editing them up or replacing them. Make sure that the tags match the first 300 words or so, in your lens. These tags are like metatags on a website, and it is important that they match the first 300 words so so, because this is usually the limit that a search engine will spider. The first 300 words should be keyword rich. I use Site Submit to check out what keywords that I will use. While I used to only use one to three keyword phrases - I will now use up to 5 keyword phrases. This comes in handy when your site has been up for a while, and you can check your stats to see how people are finding your website. You will see that they are using more than three words, and it is important to put these phrases into your tags. You can visit my The Search Engine Directory to check out more about keywords or content.

I have been finding out the importance of this over the past while. Actually, I learned this from Zimbio and their Kudos. People want and need traffic to their websites, and this is one of the best ways to generate traffic. Hopefully, your lens will rise in rank, and generate even more traffic. Lensrank works much the same way Google's pagerank works, the higher your pagerank, the closer to the top your lens will appear in the search results. While the search engines are still very important, and the content should still be written with these in mind, Squidoo still provides a good amount of traffic. The Fan Clubs and Comments are a good way to get people to view your lens. Other Social Networking sites have ways to get people to view their sites, and Squidoo now has theirs.

While I like to have a good number of quality lens, you just do not know what people will want to see. One of my most consistent lens has been Nightmare Before Christmas lens. I never knew that before I put it up. It just took off, and in October it hit a high of 349, not bad for a lens that was only a couple months old at the time. It drove a lot of customers to our store. Others that I thought would be great is the Perfect Your Sports with the Nintendo Wii, it's numbers stink. So, you never know which lens will be your goose that lays the golden egg or the one that will be your dud.

I also try and work my floundering lenses. I am constantly reworking my lenses, trying to find a working solution. I just know that you have to be topical if you want any success at making money at squidoo. One of my Valentines Day Lenses gets over 200 views per week, almost 180 from Google. I am currently working on Baseball and Easter Lenses, so I think that the spring will be good to me.

There are many affiliate programs to make money from, like Clickbank has an incredible selection of programs to chose from. Many people are making money off this program. Commission Junction is one of the top programs to make money, and you have the choice of joing several programs here. You can put up a lens and use any one of hundreds of merchants that they have signed up underneath them. UsFreeAds.com has a great affiliate program, and you will want to make them part of your bum marketing. Most of my commissions comes from Amazon I like their diverse slection of products, and their reputation.

This is necessary for each of your lenses. There are quite a number of bookmarking websites out there. You never know when a bookmarking site generates a lot of traffic or not. I submitted my New Years Resolution to several bookmarking websites and received over 350 visitors in a little over an hour! Well, not all lenses will get that amount of traffic, but you never know. After that experience I am sold on Social Bookmarking. How do you find the Social Bookmarking sites - go to Squid Utilities and follow the instructions there. Try and register at as many sites as possible, this seems tedious at first, but once you are registered, it becomes just a matter of copy/paste for each entry.